


Bringing the Past Forward

by Buffintruder



Category: The Bright Sessions (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Japanese-American Character, Sibling Bonding, bonding through food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-21 02:38:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16150787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Buffintruder/pseuds/Buffintruder
Summary: Joan just wanted to get over a tiring day and indulge in some nostalgia, but she wasn't complaining at having the chance to spend a quiet evening with her brother.Sometimes looking back helps with moving forward.





	Bringing the Past Forward

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes, you’re just feeling lonely and underrepresented and in the mood to write the Bryant siblings being Japanese and eating Japanese food.  
> Mark's Japanese is what I would have said before taking a year of Japanese class, so it isn’t very correct or proper and probably means that their parents come from the Kansai region.  
> (After I started writing this, my mom made a comment about how “in our culture, we show our love through food” so clearly I was onto something with this, even if I didn't realize it when I started.)  
> This takes place sometime between episode 48 and 53

Maybe it was because it had been a long and frustrating day at work, but when Joan came home to find that Mark was out, probably with Sam, she was struck by an exhausting loneliness, a homesickness for easier times.

As happy as she was that Mark and Sam’s relationship was progressing to the point where he spent more nights at her place than Joan’s, she missed having someone to talk to when she got home.

She also missed her easy relationship with her brother, but that had been gone for years, and she knew its loss was her own fault.

A tiny part of Joan wanted to go back to a time before she had made any mistakes, before Mark and her parents had fallen out (not that they had ever really been close). But she knew a time traveller, and even Sam would not be able to remake Joan’s troubled past. She was longing for something that had never existed.

Moping never helped anybody, Joan told herself to no avail as she stared blankly down her empty hallway. There were better ways to spend her evening.

But she was unable to resist giving into nostalgia a little, so despite her weariness, Joan kicked off her shoes and made her way to the kitchen. She took out a kettle, filled it with water, and set it on the stove; the first step in her dinner preparation.

There wasn’t much correlation between making food and her general feelings that the world would be generally better off if she hadn’t existed past the age of about 22 or so, but doing something with her hands made her feel less useless.

Digging through one of her cupboards, she found some barley tea bags near the back. They were pretty old. Joan hadn’t touched them for more months than she cared to consider, but she was pretty sure they were still good. Tea bags weren’t the kind of thing that went bad, were they? She chose the topmost one and stuck it in the kettle, turning off the stove once the water started to boil.

As she waited for the tea to seep, Joan washed some rice, mixing it with the azuki beans that Mark had bought a week ago for some unfathomable reason. She hoped he wouldn’t mind her using them, but she figured that if Mark had some use in mind for them, he would have already done it. Joan could always buy more from the Asian food market if he really wanted them.

After setting it into the rice cooker, Joan took out a small pot, once more filling it with water and putting it on the stove to boil.

This part was familiar, and there was something comforting about doing something she had done a thousand times before. The world felt a little more stable, a little more peaceful, a little more under her control.

When the water was hot enough, she dumped the miso soup mix into it. It was the dried, prepackaged kind because there were a lot of times in Joan’s life when she wanted something warm and comforting, and those rarely overlapped with the times that she wanted to put time and energy into cooking something from scratch.

Then, because she had time to kill while waiting for the rice to cook and because the meal felt lacking without a meat-based main dish, Joan mixed ground bread, chopped onions, and a couple of eggs into ground beef.

She divided the lump of meat into patties, pressing them flat before frying them on a pan. Hambaagu wasn’t the most traditional of Japanese foods, which kind of broke the theme Joan had going on, but it was also something she could easily make with the things in her fridge.

Making childhood food wasn’t effective at combating nostalgia and her longing for the past, but it felt like what Joan needed. Already, the smells were making her feel better. Going back wasn’t something Joan could do, and if she thought about it hard enough, it probably wasn’t even something she wanted to do. But indulging in this memory trip was nice, a reminder of a part of her she had almost forgotten about.

Joan was flipping over the sizzling patties when a noise startled her. She glanced up to find Mark standing in the doorway. She had assumed that Mark wouldn’t be returning that night, but he didn’t always stay over at Sam’s, so she shouldn’t have been surprised at his appearance.

Mark glanced around, taking in the steaming rice cooker, the pot of miso soup, and the hambaagu still cooking in the pan. “Tadaima,” he said softly. _I’m home._

It had been a very long time since Joan had heard that word. Long ago, she had said it every day when she got home from school and heard it every time her parents came home from work, but ever since she moved out and drifted apart from Mark, there had been no one to say it to and nobody to hear it from. Even after she got Mark back from the past and after he returned to her, they had never spoken much Japanese to each other.

It took her a moment for the response to find its way into Joan’s mouth. “Okaeri.” _Welcome back._

“Hambaagu tsukuttenno?” _You’re making hambaagu?_ Mark asked in the informal dialect he had learned from their parents.

“Un.” _Yes._ Remembering with a start that she was supposed to be watching the meat, Joan hurriedly flipped the rest of the patties.

She wasn’t sure why Mark was speaking to her in Japanese. It had always been a private language for the two of them, especially after leaving their parents. Out of all the people that they knew, it was something that only the two of them shared, so it connected them. Joan wasn’t sure if Mark was simply using Japanese because of the food she was making, or if it was a gesture of reconciliation, or if it was both.

After Mark had told Damien to leave town, they had talked some things over more, but that didn’t mean their relationship was healed. Maybe it was just Joan being optimistic, but she thought that this was at least another step in that direction.

“Kyou wa dou datta?” _How was your day?_ Joan asked, her inflections following the more formal standard dialect she had learned in college.

It was too stilted, not the kind of language she heard her family speak growing up, but Joan didn’t know enough of her parents’ Japanese to always say what she wanted to, and it felt more awkward to switch back and forth. Mark had never formally studied the language, so he only knew that kind of Japanese and was perfectly willing to switch in any English words or grammar structures when he needed to, casual in a way that she didn’t know how to be.

“Fine,” Mark said, and Joan didn’t know if he was breaking the moment or simply didn’t know how to respond in Japanese or what. But then he added, “Ii nioi.” _Smells good._

“Can you get out some plates?” Joan asked. She poked at the sizzling meat on the pan with her spatula. It seemed almost done, but she couldn’t be certain.

“Sure,” he said, taking out two plates and four bowls, placing them on the counter near the stove.

Joan used a ladle to pour some of the miso soup into two of the bowls while Mark got a rice paddle to scoop the rice into the remaining ones.

“Oh, you made sekihan!” he said, opening the rice cooker.

Joan shrugged. “You bought the beans. And it’s been awhile.”

“You know, for something that’s called red rice, it’s actually quite purple,” Mark remarked.

“That’s not the first time you’ve made that comment,” Joan said, but she was smiling.

“And I’m still not wrong.” He raised his eyebrows at her, daring her to contradict him. She simply rolled her eyes at him.

While Mark carried the bowls over to the table, Joan flipped the finished hambaagu onto the plates. There were still a few uncooked patties, but Joan figured she could finish them later, after eating with her brother.

“I don’t know the sauce mom used to always make with these,” Joan said. “But I’ve found that mixing ketchup and barbeque sauce makes a decent replacement.”

Mark snorted, but he turned back to the fridge to get out the condiments.

Pulling out some cups, Joan poured the barley tea, which had cooled off by now. She turned to her utensil drawer and picked out two sets of wooden chopsticks. “Do you want a fork too?”

“Sure,” Mark said. “Rice, misoshiru, whatever, I’m fine eating with chopsticks. But hambaagu is really more of a fork and knife kind of thing.”

“I agree,” Joan said, carrying everything to the table. She remembered struggling to cut the hambaagu into bite sized pieces with chopsticks as a kid. It was only after she moved out that she began eating it with western utensils.

The meal was set out, far more neat and orderly than anything Joan had made for quite awhile. She caught Mark staring wistfully at the scene before sitting down, and she wondered if Mark missed parts of the past more than he claimed to. Joan was glad they were away from their parents, but she had missed this, had missed feeling Japanese in a way that made her feel like an insider rather than an outsider.

“Itadakimasu,” Mark said, a thank you to the lives that had been given to create this meal.

“Itadakimasu,” Joan echoed. It had been a long time since she last said that too.

Silence lay between them as they dug in, but it wasn’t as tense as it easily could have been.

“Meccha oishii!” _This tastes really good!_ Mark said after a few moments, his mouth still full of hambaagu. Joan would have been more annoyed at his poor manners if she wasn’t too busy being pleased that her cooking had actually been a success.

“Thanks.” Joan lifted a chunk of rice between her chopsticks to her mouth. It somehow tasted exactly like her memories of it and nothing like she expected. “How is Sam doing?”

“Fine,” Mark said. “She’s doing pretty well. We’re both doing pretty well together.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Joan said, scrambling to figure out how to continue to the conversation. “Is her research going well?”

“Yeah.” There was something abrupt in the way that Mark said it, like he didn’t want to expand on that, or like there was something he was leaving out. Joan decided not to push; she could always ask Sam herself, and she didn’t want to ruin whatever peaceful feeling had settled over them.

“That’s good.”

“Got any interesting patients today?” Mark asked, lifting the bowl of miso soup up to take a sip. He winced and set it back down, quickly reaching out for the cup of cooler tea.

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“Right. Patient confidentiality or whatever.”

“It’s kind of important to my job,” Joan said dryly.

Mark looked back down at his meal, and Joan couldn’t tell if it was just because he was having a bit of difficulty picking up a bit of rice with the chopsticks, or if he was trying to avoid some of the awkwardness of this stilted small talk. “Do you make this often?”

“Not really,” Joan admitted. “I have miso soup a lot, but none of this other stuff.”

“Tonight’s just special?”

“Yeah,” Joan said. She didn’t quite know how to explain that feeling of being drowned and trapped in the present, of desperately needing something old to cling onto. “I was in the mood for something familiar.”

Mark nodded. “I missed this, you know? I mean, when I was stuck in the past, I missed a lot of things, but I missed this in a different way.”

“I guess there were a lot of white people in Victorian England,” she said. It seemed like the least loaded direction she could take this.

“You’d be surprised at how many weren’t,” Mark said, grinning slightly for a moment before letting it fade. “But I meant more that I’ve been missing this for longer than a lot of the other stuff.”

“I understand,” Joan said, because she hadn’t been trapped in a state of half-existence over two centuries in the past, but it wasn’t like she had much connections to this side of her culture in all that time either. “Remember some of those Japanese foods that we used to have all the time when we were little?”

“Yeah!” Mark said, allowing the conversation to switch with some relief. “Like those those things we made, you know, with the an inside?”

“An pancakes,” Joan remembered.

“I tried so hard to convince my white friend that sweet bean paste could taste good. She never believed me.” He shook his head. “I guess she missed out on some good stuff.”

Joan grinned. “Remember that time when you tried to—”

Mark shook his head violently. “Oh, no, no, no, you are not telling that story!”

“Mark, there’s no one around to hear it!”

“Well, I’m around, and I don’t want to hear it,” he said stubbornly. “You’re never going to let me live this down, are you? I was like five!”

Joan snorted. She had told him that switching the refried beans in tacos with an would not be a good idea, but he had been so sure of himself.

“You go on about my culinary disasters when it’s not even that big of a mistake! What about the time you thought eating ramen with hummus would be a good idea, huh?”

“I was in college,” Joan defended. “It was a very stressful time in my life, and my choices were not the most thought out.”

“ _Clearly_ ,” Mark said.

Joan couldn’t help but smile. For the first time that evening, she felt as if exhaustion had loosened its grip on her. She was still tired, but it had slowly become a more comfortable feeling rather than a soul-crushing weariness. It had been a while since Mark and her had teased each other in this fashion, and she hadn’t realized how good it was to have that in her life until now.

“We should make something together sometime,” Joan suggested. She wanted to spend more time with her brother in a situation where they could just have fun. Something low-pressure and not likely to bring up anything more serious.

Mark raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”

“Well,” Joan said. “You always did like wrapping the gyoza.”

“Hey, you liked doing it too,” Mark said.

Joan smiled and shrugged. “What can I say? It’s fun.”

“Hmm,” Mark said, pausing his eating to pretend to consider it deeply. “Can I invite Sam?”

“Of course. That’s one more person to eat the final product.” They only ever made gyoza in bulk, and there was only so much two people could eat before they grew tired of any food. “Besides, she’s starting to become part of our family in a way, isn’t she?”

“I guess,” Mark said a little awkwardly. “Did you have a date in mind for this?”

“I don’t have work this Sunday,” Joan said.

“Sounds good with me.”

The conversation having slowed back down, Joan moved her fork to take another bite of her hambaagu, only to discover that there was none left. Looking properly back down at her food, she realized that it was mostly gone. Without even noticing, she had nearly finished her meal.

“Thank you for making this, Joanie,” Mark said. He was done with his food too, and he started to stand up, reaching over to stack her empty dishes on top of his. “Gochisousama.” _Thank you for the meal._

“No problem,” she said. Then she smirked. “So does this mean you’ll make a meal for me? I expect three courses.”

“Joan!” Mark whined as he carried the dishes to the sink.

She gave him a stern look, but she was sure that she was unable to fully hide her humor.

“I’ll wash the dishes, but _that’s it_ ,” Mark said. “And maybe cook the rest of this hambaagu.”

“Fair enough,” Joan said. She stood, pushing her chair back under the table. She turned to start heading to her room, but she changed her mind before she took her first step and went over to Mark by the sink instead. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, meaning both in the century and for the dinner.

“So am I,” Mark said with a cheesy grin. Then he turned more serious, reaching out to squeeze her hand and hold it, as they had when they were children without all their issues lying between them. “Thanks, Joanie.”

“Any time,” she said, squeezing back. “I’m going to go to bed now.”

He let go of her hand. “Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Get some rest,” she told him, hoping that this would not be another of his sleepless nights.

Mark smiled weakly. “I’ll try.”

“Good.” Joan started to turn away towards her oom.

“Oyasumi,” _Goodnight,_ he said.

“Oyasumi,” she replied, feeling a little more at peace with her life.


End file.
